Liam Neeson leads an Irish thriller with western overtones.
“In the Land of Saints and Sinners” plays like a western on an Irish coast during the 1970s, and it sure feels authentic with the direction and ambiance. Using an Irish cast-with familiar names like Liam Neeson, Kerry Condon, Ciaran Hinds, and Colm Meaney-and beautifully shot locations, you’re able to see various characters written with ambitions and goals.
Whether or not you can understand their Thick accents is debatable, but you are able to acknowledge who they are, where they come from, and what they want out of life. Or you can use “In the Land of Saints and Sinners” as a make-up present for how you suffered through Neeson’s last two films “Marlowe” and “Retribution.” However you view this movie comes from your perspective. I, in my opinion, can see it both ways.
Neeson plays ex-assassin Finbar Murphy, who takes his targets out in the woods, makes them bury their own graves, shoots them, and plants trees on top of them. He decides to put his shotgun on his mantle and give up a life of crime for a more peaceful life. His boss Robert McQue (Colm Meaney) seems okay with his choices, but does he have to be the evil, manipulative one? Forget that cliché.
He can do whatever pleases himself, spending time shooting cans with his police friend Vincent (Hinds), visiting his kind friend Rita (Niamh Cusack), and hanging around at the pub. All the things that makes an Irish old man content. I’m half-Irish, so it’s nice for me to see Irish characters engage in whatever makes him joyful.
Everything seems lucky, he befriends a little girl named Moya (Michelle Gleeson), who is being abused. Not by her bartender mother Sinead (Sarah Greene), but by Curtis June (Desmond Eastwood), a crazy member of an IRA terrorist group, whom they are housing in the shack next to them.
The old man knows she and her mother are in danger from him, so gives him a lift, and stuffs him in the trunk of his car to take him to his planting ground. But even as the man tries to fight back, he gets executed by a young man named Kevin Lynch (Jack Gleeson from “Game of Thrones), who digs Curtis’ grave and is fascinated to know about Finder’s life of crime.
But Curtis’ death alerts his sister and the IRA leader Doireann McCann (Kerry Condon), who is willing to find the man responsible. So, she decides to make life Hell for Finbar, even if it means putting the lives of everyone else in danger. At first, you think she has a conscience when she tries and fails to save a family from one of their attacks, but she turns out to be more ruthless, especially when she insults her team players: the confused Seamus (Seamus O’Hara) and the short Conan (Colin MacNeill). And she’s also the kind of person who would refuse Finbar’s cease fire offer.
I may not understand everything going on in “In the Land of Saints and Sinners,” but it’s about damn time we get a new Liam Neeson movie that is actually smart, actually provocative, and actually entertaining. It was directed by Robert Lorenz, who is best known for collaborating with Clint Eastwood on his movies, and for directing “Trouble with the Curve” and “The Marksman” (also starring Neeson). There’s a lot of ambition and direction within the characters, played memorably by Neeson, Condon, Jack Gleeson, Cusack, and Hinds, and there’s an old-fashioned tone of both the Western and Irish homeland genres that merges quite well.
We can save the mean-spirited behaviors and typical cliches for the saps, and look at this movie in a different perspective. Maybe I’m being positive about this movie for my Irish roots and appreciation for Neeson taking a break from crappy movies. Or maybe we can take our time with the characters and decisions made here. Who knows? We might get lucky.